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Ashes.

“’And why do you pray?’ I asked him. ‘I pray to the God within me that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions.’”

“I told him that I did not believe that they could burn people in our age, that humanity would never tolerate it.”

“We were the only men on earth.”

“Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of madness?”

“Never shall I forget that night,

the first night

[…] that smoke

[…] the small faces

[…] those flames

[…] the nocturnal silence

[…] those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.”

“Never.”

“The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.”

“And I, the former mystic, was thinking: Yes, man is stronger, greater than God.”

“Every question possessed a power that did not lie in the answer.”

“Action is the only remedy to indifference, the most insidious danger of all.”

This series of quotes is almost like a timeline depicting the evolution of Wiesel’s/Eliezer’s mindset from the time before the Holocaust to the time after. Before his imprisonment, Eliezer wholeheartedly believed in God and religion. But the time and effort he spent in his early days of the Holocaust were soon realized to have been wasted trying to reach the divine powers in order to pray for relief. It seems as if Eliezer’s abandonment of faith was caused by God’s lack of response to his cries. He became indifferent to the rest of the world, even feeling scorn against his father.